You get a bike train that stretches four blocks long and numbers about 150 people. That’s what happened at Beach School this morning. Check out the amazing video below (taken by Beach parent Suzanne Clarke):

In just a few short years, biking has gone from being prohibited to embraced at Beach School and it has transformed that community. Imagine what it could do to yours.

— Beach is one of many Portland schools that is part of the Bike Train network. Check out BikeTrainPDX.org to sign up your school and learn more.

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It looks interesting and is a great intro to getting people riding
I wonder about the idea of filling a roadway – whether a sharrows/bikeway/other – with kids is a good educational start [i.e. haphazardly pedaling all over the road as opposed to the right and ‘singl-ish file’ and within the appropriate lane/direction of travel]. Certainly the one off event may not be harmful for this type of riding but when Jr. decides to hit the roads on his own with with a couple of friends – where will he ride? As a bicycle commuter for nearing 20 years – predictable riding is the one constant I see for safety.
Good work organizers – riding and walking have long ago been passed up.

I wouldn’t worry. With bike trains this successful, by the time Jr. wants to strike out on his (or her) own, the streets will be owned by bikes anyway. Look at Copenhagen. What you and I learned as lone cyclists in auto-centric streets is still useful, but more useful is what each of these kids is learning about how streets are for everyone. The tide is going their way.

right on! This should do a good job of pacifying any angry drivers on the road. How could you get impatient or mad at a group of kids like that?

@JeffP, I think the size of the group makes it fairly safe to take up the whole road. A single file line on the left would probably be more educational, but wouldn’t be safe in this scenario. Those kids are all going at different speeds, and if you were to put them in a line, most would be tempted to overtake the person in front of them (which means lots of swerving in and out of the road). I’m sure their parents have taught them on proper cycling etiquette… assuming most of them are avid cyclists, if they’re letting their kid participate in a bike train.

Is this really any different than motorists who think the road belongs to them and they don’t need to share it with anyone else? It looks like anyone on any vehicle who’s not going the same direction at the same speed is out of luck. Doesn’t seem like the right message for cyclists to be putting out.

i don’t have a tape measure with me, but it does not look like you could get two motor vehicles through here going opposite directions anyway, what with all the hardware parked along the edges. so what you are proposing is that these kids should single up in order to allow an imaginary oncoming motorist to squeeze through and take one of these kids under his wheels? or break up the group every time some motorist decides to cut through on this street instead of some other? i mean, what exactly is your suggestion here?

Nobody expects any vehicle to be operating on the left, and rarely check for oncoming traffic in the lane they’re turning into (since in most places, Portland and Eugene being notable exception, laws against driving on the wrong side of the street or the opposite direction of a one-way street are enforced). And we’re talking about a pretty obviously marked bike boulevard; motorists can’t really shortcut down these effectively anyway based on the ones I’ve been around. This is about educating the next generation of cyclists to do it right, and in the specific case of this bike boulevard, not creating an entirely preventable hazard to anyone, cyclists in particular, who might want to go the other way.

Was there any danger? What’s the context? There’s a risk to everything we do in life. There is a risk that a kid will see parents run a red light today under good judgment, and then run a red under solo bad judgment.

I see a lot of cars run red lights under extremely dangerous conditions.

Let’s weigh all the relative good and bad of anything. I see mountains of of good in this bike train.